This month, we have original fiction from Adam-Troy Castro (“The Old Horror Writer”) and Lisa Goldstein (“Sawing”), along with reprints by Joe Hill (“Twittering from the Circus of the Dead”) and Sarah Langan (“The Lost”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a feature interview with Angela Slatter.

Fiction

He’s harder to find than most. I have the basis for comparison because I’ve gotten to all of them sooner or later, from the big names to the obscurities. There are some who give up so thoroughly, and disappear so completely, that it’s as if they never existed at all. This guy’s far from the worst. He’s an old man now, twenty years removed from his last novel and ten from his last short story; he’s no longer a member of HWA or SFWA, and the agency that used to handle his interests now has him in their estate file.

Author Spotlight

“The Old Horror Writer” was an anxiety story. I publish frequently, but you cannot say that I’m bestriding the literary world like a colossus. From time to time, I have dark thoughts about whether I’m wasting my effort, or where I’ll end up on the day the words stop coming. So I set up a character who was very specifically a version of myself and filled his tale with my bleakest musings about this endeavor that’s consumed my life, and its relevancy to the fate of this beleaguered planet.

Fiction

What is Twitter? “Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing? . . . Answers must be under 140 characters in length and can be sent via mobile texting, instant message, or the Web.”

Author Spotlight

Whenever I come across a new form, I’m always curious to see how it might be bent to fictional ends. And horror has a long history of using the most novel means of communication to create unexpected shocks. Dracula, for example, used letters, telegrams, diary entries, and wax recordings to stitch together a dark tapestry of unease. Blair Witch Project employed apparently unedited documentary style footage to disturb the audience. And so on.

Nonfiction

Music has always been used to tell stories. Ancient epics were written in verse, ballads were a means of spreading popular legends—there’s something about the combination of plot, character, rhythm and rhyme that helps a story stick in the mind when music is used to help spin a yarn. Naturally, musicians have all sorts of interests, so the stories they tell are as diverse as those you’d find in a bookstore—which means that genre fiction is represented alongside romance and action. Genre music flourished in the 1970s.

Fiction

Clarissa watched from the wings as the Great Bertoldi sawed a woman in half. Down went the saw through the coffin-like box, then up, then down again. A cigarette burned at the side of his mouth, on the edge of his smile. The saw broke through the box. He put it down and slid metal plates between the two halves, then rolled the sections apart. The woman’s head poked out from the end of one of the sections, feet from the other.

Author Spotlight

I’d gone to the Oakland Museum and seen the original of the photograph Migrant Mother, by Dorothea Lange. It’s a very powerful portrait of a woman migrant during the Depression, and for some reason I’d never seen it before, and it really haunted me. Then I started thinking about the Depression, and how horrible it must have been to be confronted with two catastrophes at once: the Dust Bowl and the failure of the banks.

Artist Showcase

Daniel Sherekin, aka Dante, aka Borodante, is a self-taught digital artist, based in Ukraine, where he practices painting, sculpting, and 3D and 2D animation. After earning a degree in computer science, he worked as a concept artist and generalist in a movie post-production company for two years, mostly designing fantasy and sci-fi creatures. He has […]

Author Spotlight

“The Lost” is one of my earliest genre efforts. I’d gotten out of Columbia for my MFA not long before, and finally felt free to experiment. Columbia’s a lot more open-minded now, but back then genre wasn’t permitted. So I tinkered a lot—trying to figure out the line between literary and genre, between symbolic loss and real loss, and how to show that. Turns out, there are no rules, right?

Fiction

A week ago, I was a salesgirl at Filene’s Basement. It was seven a.m. on the morning of our semi-annual suit sale, and I was driving my twelve-year-old Saturn down Stewart Avenue. I was late for work because I’d stayed up drinking Wild Turkey in front of Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein. It was a depressing good time for lonely hearts at the casa de Koszalin, punctuated by a screaming alarm at 6:30 a.m. and cheese doodles dried to the side of my face.

Nonfiction

Angela Slatter has been producing award-winning short fiction for ten years, ever since she graduated with an MA and PhD in Creative Writing. Slatter, who counts Angela Carter as a major influence, writes stories that often play on traditional fairy tales, and are set in a timeless past. Her work often centers on female protagonists and antagonists, and has been gathered into such acclaimed collections as Sourdough and Other Stories (2010) and Black-Winged Angels (2014). In 2015, Tor published her novella Of Sorrows and Such, and in July 2016 Jo Fletcher Books will publish her first novel.